School leaders will see how to leverage a core set of digital tools to boost personal productivity, professional learning and school and district communications. Learn tips and tricks from experts and come away from this hands-on experience with ideas for engaging your school community in creative ways.

Lucy is a dynamic, innovative, influential, and well-connected educator, and she is also a good friend. I was equally flattered and grateful that she included me on her ISTE proposal, and it was a thrill to share our stories, knowledge, help, and tips with our attendees. With Lucy’s blessing, I’ll be leading a scaled down version of the workshop with attendees at iEARN (International Education and Resource Network) Annual Conference and Youth Summit in Morocco next month.

Lucy and I began the workshop with an icebreaker I learned about from Claudia Stanfield at last year’s EdTech Summit Africa. (I’m so excited that I’ll get to reunite with Claudia in late July at this summer’s EdTech tour too!) On each section of a beach ball, Lucy and I included terms that should be part of every educator’s social media lexicon: hashtag, RT, DM, handle, meme, geotag, metadata, etc. Each participant tosses the beach ball to someone else, and you have to have a conversation about whatever word is on the top section of the ball when you catch it. Depending on how people hold the ball, it’s a little subjective as to what constitutes the “top” of the ball, but the activity always leads to good discussion, so it’s all good…

For the rest of the conference, I was free to attend and explore sessions, keynotes, and posters. I also spent a fair amount of time making loops around the Expo Hall looking for compelling items. Here are some tweets I shared or retweeted:

Facebook is […] widely assumed to have more data than anyone else. That data is useful for advertising, which is Facebook’s main source of revenue. But the data is also an asset. The two-hundred-and-seventy-billion-dollar valuation of Facebook, which made a profit of three billion dollars last year, is based on some faith that piling up all of that data has value in and of itself. It’s like a virtual Fort Knox—with a gold mine attached to it. One reason Mark Zuckerberg is so rich is that the stock market assumes that, at some point, he’ll figure out a new way to extract profit from all the data he’s accumulated about us.

…For the most valuable innovation at the heart of Facebook was probably not the social network (Friendster thought of that) so much as the creation of a tool that convinced hundreds of millions of people to hand over so much personal data for so little in return. As such, Facebook is a company fundamentally driven by an arbitrage opportunity—namely, the difference between how much Facebook gets, and what it costs to simply provide people with a place to socialize. That’s an arbitrage system that might evaporate in a world of rational payments. If we were smart about the accounting, we’d be asking Facebook to pay us.

Since NewsCorp bought MySpace for $580 million dollars in 2005, I have had so many conversations with students, parents, teachers, friends, family, and strangers about what I imagined NewsCorp was buying. Data. An ocean of freely shared data about its users from its users: Who are you? Who do you know? What do you do? Specifically, what are your likes and dislikes for bands, songs, cars, jeans, sodas, shampoos, computers, magazines, pizza toppings, television channels, narcotics, candidates, Friends characters? Where do you shop, hang out, watch movies? People freely and willingly uploaded any and all personal information and preferences to MySpace, and NewsCorps hoped to sift through swells of big data for advertising and internet marketing purposes. Six years later, NewsCorps sold MySpace for $35 million dollars in 2011. Ruh roh.

For almost two decades, I’ve working mainly with middle school students and teachers. During my time at The School at Columbia University, Don Buckley (Director of Innovation from 2006-2013) asked Cristina Martinez (our Systems Administrator) to set up an internal social network using Elgg back in like 2007 or 2008. To demonstrate that a social network is EMPTY until people populate it with information, we start every school year with a blank social network after archiving the previous year’s work. I constantly reinforce that everything posted online is either public or less public, so if you want something to be private, you should never upload it. Below are links to some posts I’ve written detailing specific annual curricular projects I’ve led using this in-house space, The Social Network:

I’m on a personal leave from The School at Columbia University this semester. My best friend, Chawadee Nualkhair (aka @BangkokGlutton), invited me to stay with her in Thailand and collaborate on creative projects including a TV pilot, a web series, and/or another book. Since relocating to Bangkok in 1995, Chow has become an expert on Thai street food and acts as an ambassador to the world of delicious, fast, inexpensive, culturally significant, varied, and omnipresent curbside dining through her photos, tweets, interviews, blog posts, television appearances, and books.

Today, Chow and I were led a half-day workshop on using smartphones to take pictures of food, and/or people in food settings, and sharing these photos via social media. Here are some topics we discussed:

Who shares? What do you share? How do you share?

Everything you put online is public, permanent, and traceable so make wise choices.

Squareready for making your rectangular photos fit within a square border

Touch Color to make part of a picture color and the rest of it black and white

Pic Stitch which creates quick and easy collages using a variety of free templates

Photo tips: rule of thirds, depth of field, lighting, angles, no flash, ask permission if you include others in the photo,

Photo ideas: focus on food and crop out most of the person’s face, include half-eaten food or food with a bite removed, don’t try to include everything in the photo, focus on an ingredient, show before-and-after plates, show empty plates.

This project is using Facebook. Consider also sharing with other communities (ex. Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr, etc.)

What is a hashtag and why? Sample hashtags to consider: #eeeeeats #foodporn #foodgasm #healthyfood #healthyeating #diet #getfit #superfood #fitspiration #cookinglight and many others

The best way to get better at photography is to take a lot of pictures yourself and look at other peoples’ photos. Suggested people to follow who take good pictures: @Infatuation @bkkfatty @bangkokfoodies @bangkokglutton @karenblumberg @jessvsworld @christao408 @nat_catandnat @migrationology @huffpostfood @bkmagazine